Konrad Lorenz

The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be.

Whenever we find, in two forms of life that are unrelated to each other, a similarity of form or of behaviour patterns which relates to more than a few minor details, we assume it to be caused by parallel adaptation to the same life-preserving function.

I grew up in the large house and the larger garden of my parents in Altenberg. They were supremely tolerant of my inordinate love for animals.

More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.

In nature we find not only that which is expedient, but also everything which is not so inexpedient as to endanger the existence of the species.

Most people have forgotten how to live with living creatures, with living systems and that, in turn, is the reason why man, whenever he comes into contact with nature, threatens to kill the natural system in which and from which he live.

I owe undying gratitude to my patient parents.

Barking dogs occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot.

The bond with a dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth can ever be.

Man has been driven out of the paradise in which he could trust his instincts.

Evil, by definition, is that which endangers the good, and the good is that which we perceive as a value.

There is indeed the possibility that the evolutionary process has, in gray antiquity, bred into us an excess of aggression.

Ethologists are often accused of drawing false analogies between animal and human behaviour. However, no such thing as a false analogy exists: an analogy can be more or less detailed and, hence, more or less informative.

If you confine yourself to this Skinnerian technique, you study nothing but the learning apparatus and you leave out everything that is different in octopi, crustaceans, insects and vertebrates. In other words, you leave out everything that makes a pigeon a pigeon, a rat a rat, a man a man, and, above all, a healthy man healthy and a sick man sick.

Barking dogs may occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot!

Humor and knowledge are the two great hopes of our culture.